


Five Things That Never Happened to Sylvain Gautier

by ronsenburg



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Additional Tags in Author's Notes, Alternate Universe, Different for Each Chapter, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-18
Updated: 2020-04-07
Packaged: 2021-03-01 00:01:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23205910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ronsenburg/pseuds/ronsenburg
Summary: A love story told across time, space, and several different universes.
Relationships: Felix Hugo Fraldarius/Sylvain Jose Gautier
Comments: 6
Kudos: 43





	1. A Marriage of Convenience

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _In which Mercedes and Sylvain discover a simple solution to a complex problem._
> 
> **Chapter Tags:** Canon Divergence AU, Tea parties, Clandestine Meetings, Overt Religious Symbolism, Implied Ace Mercedes, Discussion of Noble Duties and Continued Bloodlines, Implied Homophobic Parents, Found Family.

Adjusting to a new life at Garreg Mach Monastery has altered Mercedes routine only just slightly, all things considered. Just as she had done before, Mercedes wakes with the coming dawn, allowing the first rays of golden light that dance across her closed eyelids to pull her from sleep. The only real difference now is that the walls around her have changed. She dresses each day in silence, the only sounds accompanying the rustle of her academy uniform as she pulls it over her head are the fountain bubbling in the greenhouse courtyard outside her open window or the occasional call of birds as they perch among branches of the gently swaying trees.

The rest of the monastery is still fast asleep when she steps out into the yard beyond the dormitory, closing the door behind her with a barely audible clicking of a lock. This early in the season, fog still clings to the grounds, catching the sunlight that has just begun to pour over the monastery walls in each and every drop. Looking out, it almost seems to be a blanket of glittering diamonds sewn into the fabric of a recently gilded earth. Without students, it is almost unrecognizable, like an entirely different, unfamiliar world. 

Waking so early each morning has many benefits, Mercedes has found. For one, it allows her the time to help the monks to clean and prepare the cathedral before lessons begin, sweeping out the ever-encroaching dust, lighting candles, and feeding the cats that shelter among the walls as though they too were members of the Goddess’s devotees. But more than that, the solitude of an early morning allows for quiet contemplation as she makes her way through the facility, something that can be notoriously difficult to find once the clashing of swords begins to ring out under the midday sky.

It also allows her to avoid some of the small, awkward blunders that can arise when one is easily lost in thought while crossing the monastery campus.

Mercedes never means to eavesdrop, really; she can’t help the fact that all her fellow classmates seem to throw themselves so thoroughly into their activities that they don’t hear the sound of her footsteps as she draws near. And once she was there, it wasn’t as though Mercedes could simply interrupt them. The fact that she grew up in a church, taught to take soft steps so as not to disturb the faithful just as surely as she memorized the litanies, really didn’t excuse being rude. 

Usually, the early hour is enough to deter these sorts of meetings. Most members of the officer’s academy sleep until the sun has risen over the horizon and those that do wake early are often as single-minded in their goals as she is. But every once and a while, she will still stumble onto something unexpected, something delicate. 

Mercedes doesn’t realize anyone is in the room, at first. 

It isn’t until she’s taken several steps past the door of the reception hall that the sound of a soft sigh and the almost inaudible rustle of cloth moving against cloth reaches her ears. 

She pauses, hesitating at the sound, and turns. 

What she finds might be the most beautiful sight that Mercedes has ever seen. 

Light from the east pours through the tall windows, filling the room in a gentle, early morning glow. Like the cathedral, some of the panes have been stained to depict the tales of the saints, stories of devotion lovingly assembled in a host of brilliant colors that sparkle like gemstones when illuminated by the rising sun. The colors mingle together in muddled and soft-edged shapes against the hardwood floors, collecting into pools of vibrant hues that seem almost more like liquid than light. 

Two figures stand in the center of one such pool, framed in varying shades of warm pink and blue. It takes Mercedes a moment to discern their identities; they stand so close that it is difficult to differentiate one from the other. But then one figure moves ever so slightly and catches the light, revealing a flash of red hair, the glint of an iron longsword buckled to a hip, and suddenly, she _knows_. 

Felix has lifted one hand to push a stray piece of hair from Sylvain’s eyes, his face is the most perfect visage of tender exasperation. This scene is not meant for Mercedes’ eyes; she watches as his hand lingers against Sylvain’s skin, just barely brushing the side of his face with his ungloved fingers. It is the most gentle that Mercedes has ever seen him. There is something so extraordinary, so intimate in his expression, that it nearly steals her breath away in a soft gasp that she is certain will give her away. But the sound of it is swallowed by Sylvain’s response, a pleased laugh and something unintelligible and affectionate mumbled in return before he leans his cheek into Felix’s waiting palm.

Mercedes has seen love many times before: in the eyes of a bride and groom as they wait for the blessing of the church on their wedding day, in a mother’s touch as she dedicates her newborn baby to the goddess, in the devotion of the monks as they bow their heads in reverent prayer. 

There are echoes of that same adoration in the way Sylvain and Felix gaze at each other now.

She turns just as Sylvain leans forward to bridge the brief distance that remains between the two, closing the door behind her as softly as she can. 

Life is complicated and uncertain enough, she thinks. 

They deserve this moment. 

For almost two weeks, she carries their secret pressed closely against her chest, only now beginning to notice the subtleties of their affection in everyday life. Sylvain always seems to be touching Felix when they are together, whether it is an arm draped over the other’s shoulders, a hand pressed to the outside of his knee, or a more fleeting brush of arms as they pass in the halls. Felix, conversely, is careful always to keep Sylvain within his sight when there is any possibility of danger. In battle, especially, he positions himself near enough to Sylvain to rush to his side at any moment, with one eye on his enemy and the other on Sylvain’s raised lance. 

It seems completely absurd that no one else has noticed it before. 

But the thing about secrets is that they have a tendency to be found out, despite their keeper’s best efforts. Mercedes is only grateful that the one to discover her knowledge is Sylvain himself, and not someone else. 

“I can’t believe him!” Sylvain is pacing a line back and forth across the floor of Mercedes’s room, his teacup steaming gently on the table where it sits, completely untouched. “I’ve never even met her!” 

Mercedes takes a thoughtful bite of the cheesecake on her plate. “It _is_ rather mysterious. Won’t her family expect the proposal to come from you?” 

“He doesn’t trust me,” Sylvain snorts disdainfully, “He thinks I’d find a way to ruin the whole thing if he left it to me.”

“Wouldn’t you, though?” 

“I don’t know, maybe!” Sylvain exclaims, gesturing with enough frustration that he almost unseats a small stuffed bear sitting on a shelf nearby. “But I should get some say in it, at least. I’m the one who has to spend the rest of my life with her, not him.” 

Mercedes hums pensively. “Maybe it won’t be so bad? Maybe she’ll like riding and opera and board games and going to parties just as much as you do! Maybe it’ll end up being the perfect match.” 

She realizes the absurdity of the words as soon as her mouth opens to speak them; not even the over-the-top enthusiasm of her tone can mask the falsity in the statement. Whoever this girl is, she could never be the perfect match for Sylvain. That person already exists, they both know it, and he likes none of the things she’d described above. 

How odd love can be. 

“You should meet her, at least?” Mercedes suggests, “Give her a chance to prove herself.”

Sylvain huffs out a dismissive laugh. “That’s exactly what he wants me to do.”

“Well, don’t worry, we’ll think of something,” she assures him, as soothingly as she knows how. “Now hurry up and sit, your tea is going to get cold and I baked this cake just for you.”

Whether it is her tone or her words, Sylvain _does_ stop his pacing, turning to her with a hollow smile and a frantic, thoughtful look in his eyes. It’s the kind of look that worries Mercedes more than anything else, as though he’s silently begging her to play along. 

“You haven’t given my proposition any more thought, have you?” he asks, winking at her as he speaks. The expression nearly breaks her heart for all its desperate pleading; it’s obvious that Sylvain is aware just how badly he’s failing to cobble together his facade of unaffected playboy in the wake of such genuine emotion. “We’d have some beautiful kids, no one could argue with that.” 

Mercedes smiles gently, trying to mask her own sadness, for his sake as well as her own. 

“We probably would,” she nods with a little chuckle, “And with two crest-carrying parents they’d almost certainly have one of their own.”

Sylvain gives a laugh of his own and Mercedes notices, with no small amount of relief, that some of the levity appears to be genuine. “Well, if my old man only cares about passing on a crest, and yours only seems to want money, maybe we’re the perfect match, huh?”

“We _would_ make both our fathers proud,” Mercedes agrees and pauses. 

Pauses because, quite abruptly, Mercedes realizes that something in the atmosphere of the room has changed. It feels charged, like a lightning spell gone rogue, electrifying the very air that surrounds them with an unidentifiable tension. At that moment, the sound of sparring and chatting students seems to fade away from beyond the slightly opened window. There is only the room and the idea currently building momentum between them.

Sylvain stares at her, his eyebrows raised until they disappear into the fringe of his hairline and his mouth opens slightly, realization spreading slowly across his face. She wonders if her expression mirrors his.

“We would, wouldn’t we?” Sylvain echoes slowly, as though considering the implications only as the words leave his lips. 

“Maybe it wouldn’t be the worst idea,” Mercedes continues, placing an index finger against her chin in mock-contemplation, though her own pulse has quickened at the thought. “It seems like we’re both stuck, aren’t we? If we don’t come up with something soon, you’ll be forced to marry your father’s choice and it’s only a matter of time before my father finds a ‘suitable’ match for me. At least this way we’d be marrying someone we actually like.”

Sylvian frowns, but Mercedes notes with some small relief, that some of the desperation seems to have left his eyes. “But Mercedes, if you married me, you’d still be stuck. You could never find the person you were meant to be with. I couldn’t ask you to do that for me.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that. I don’t,” she replies, tone positively chipper. “I’ll be happy enough just being able to spend my time working here, with Lady Rhea and the church. And you—”

Sylvain interrupts her before she can finish, crossing the room swiftly to slide into his previously abandoned chair and leaning towards her with the most charming of all his smiles. “I’ll be different, I promise. On the goddess, I’ll desist in my old, philandering ways.”

“I’m not worried about that either,” Mercedes replies warmly and reaches out to place one of her hands in his. “I already know that’s not the real you.”

Sylvain laughs. “You really get me, huh, Mercedes? I’d be lucky to have you as a wife.”

“I certainly try, at least,” Mercedes hums in agreement. “But shouldn’t you talk to Felix before we decide anything?”

It’s an innocent mistake, really, but one she recognizes immediately as the smile on Sylvain’s face goes suddenly rigid with the strain of keeping it in place. The hand still pressed under her own tenses. 

“Why would I need to ask Felix?”

“ _Oh_! Well, I only meant…” But she falters before she can reply. The sweets they had been eating earlier feel like iron settling deep into the pit of her stomach. Gaze quickly averted, she pulls her hand from his, her fingers reaching for the napkins placed on the table between. “Um, he _is_ your best friend. Don’t you think you should get his advice?”

Sylvain only watches, tracking her fingers as they begin to fold the fabric into distinct, distracted creases. Mercedes can feel the question burning in his eyes like the glare of the spotlight they’d improvised for Dorothea’s most recent production. “He’ll think it’s a terrible idea, as usual. But more importantly, you know you’re a terrible liar, right?”

“Lying isn’t a skill that’s usually celebrated by the goddess,” she murmurs softly in response and places the now-folded napkins to the side of the table.

But he _is_ right, in the end; she hates lying and the truth can never be avoided for very long. Especially when the knowledge has been burning in her heart like an ember since that day, her happiness for their happiness very nearly palpable.

Mercedes brings her eyes back up to meet his gaze slowly. “I was passing through the reception hall last week on my way to pray,” she begins, “Usually it’s empty so early in the morning. But that day you and Felix were… already there. I’m so sorry for intruding, I didn’t realize it was a private moment until it was too late.”

Mercedes is used to the expressiveness of Sylvain’s face. She’s used to him using it as a weapon to further his charm, carefully arranging his expression to best suit whatever feigned emotion he is trying to convey. But now his face seems beyond his own control, shifting swiftly between curiosity and confusion in the blink of an eye until suddenly, his expression becomes perfectly, totally blank. 

“That’s why you don’t want to get married, isn’t it?” Mercedes surmises, keeping her tone as gentle as she can. “Because you’re already in love with someone else?”

It takes several long, uncomfortable seconds for Sylvain to recover. Mercedes watches as his features struggle to settle into an expression that she supposes is meant to be incredulous amusement. It doesn’t look the slightest bit convincing. 

“I don’t know what you think you saw,” he says finally, “but it’s not like that. Felix and I are just old friends.”

“It’s all right, really. You can trust me.”

But Sylvain doesn’t answer. 

Neither of them moves for what feels like an entire age. 

Mercedes watches with growing concern as Sylvain looks away first to the window and then to the top of the little wood table that sits in her room. He seems to be studying the lines of the grain where it neatly bisects the surface with an unmatched intensity, as though it were a map with the answers drawn out in ley lines upon it. 

“Sylvain?” she prompts and reaches to take his hand once again. 

It feels remarkably cold against the skin of her fingers, like it has suddenly turned to ice.

“I guess we always knew it couldn’t go on like this forever,” he murmurs with a finality to his tone that shakes her. When he looks back up into her eyes, his smile is unbearably sad. “Looks like we should’ve been more careful. Does everyone know?”

And just like that, Mercedes' heart immediately breaks into a thousand pieces, each tinted dark with remorse. 

“Sylvain, _no_ ,” she whispers. Before he can say anything else, she stands and throws her arms around his shoulders, awkwardly embracing him where he still sits, stiff-backed in his chair. The sound of her voice is muffled where she presses her face into his shoulder. “No one is judging you. I’m telling you because I’m _happy_ for you. I want to help.”

Sylvain pulls away slightly, enough that he can attempt to glance down into her face. “What do you mean?”

“Would your father understand? The way you feel about Felix, I mean.” She is careful to keep her tone free of any assumption, but the sound of Sylvain’s derisive snort is answer enough. Mercedes sits back into her chair, clasping his hand firmly between her own once again, and smiles brightly. “Then let’s get married.”

For a moment, Sylvain only regards her quietly, brows pulled tightly together in confusion. “You mean, you really wouldn’t mind being married to someone you didn’t love? Who was always sneaking around with someone else behind your back?”

“Don’t be silly; I love you very much,” she assures sweetly. “Just not in the same way that you love Felix. And of course, I wouldn’t mind. Not if it meant that you could be together. I would be so happy for you both.”

“That still doesn’t solve the problem of diminishing bloodlines.” 

She shakes her head. “But it _does_ buy us time. There must be other ways to pass on a crest, we just have to find them.”

Sylvain’s eyes seem to be searching her face for any insincerity or hesitation. But there will be none for him to find; it nearly surprises her as much as it must surprise Sylvain, but Mercedes has never been more sure of any decision she has ever made. Warmth begins to slowly return to his face, the pallor fading with each passing moment like the winter’s steady advance into spring; his hand is once again warm in her own.

“You sure?” he asks. He seems to be attempting to keep his voice neutral, possibly to allow her the chance to back out if she would like. But there is something building behind his tone, something tentative and trusting trying to break free. “If we do this, we can’t really take it back.”

Mercedes nods decisively, pressing her hands more tightly to his. 

“I’m sure.”

And then, without any sort of warning, Sylvain starts to laugh. 

The sound fills the space between the walls of her small dormitory. Mercedes is certain she’s never heard such an array of authentic emotion from him before; all at once filled with equal parts surprise, relief, and pure, unrestrained joy. 

It sends her own heart fluttering inside her chest in solidarity.

“Well then,” Sylvain begins, and in one fluid movement, he lowers to one knee beside the seat of her chair. “I guess there’s only one thing left to do,”

Spring is a time for rebirth, for second chances and for new life. A gust of early morning breeze stirs the lace curtains behind the two of them, sending the scent of freshly blooming flowers through the room with the soft, eastern light. And for the first time that Mercedes can ever remember, when Sylvain looks up into her gently smiling gaze, there is genuine hope in his eyes. 

“Mercedes von Martlitz,” he begins, grinning back at her in return, “would you do me the honor of becoming my wife?”


	2. Larceny and a Funeral

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _In which Sylvain realizes grief can manifest in many different ways._  
>   
>  **Chapter Tags** : modern au, buckle up kiddos this one is sad, canon character death, dead brothers, funerals, quasi-grand-theft-auto, lots of pining

They hold the funeral on a Thursday.

It starts raining early in the morning, soaking the ground around town in gray sheets of water that pour from the sky and end up pooling in deep puddles all over the pavement. Sylvain can feel it soaking through the soles of his leather shoes; they squeak faintly with each step on the funeral home’s old linoleum, repeatedly drawing attention to the fact that the toes inside his damp socks feel more like ice than actual, human flesh.

By the time they reach the gravesite, the temperature has dropped nearly ten degrees from the early morning high.

Everyone shivers in their late spring coats.

What Sylvain can only describe as an actual field of flower arrangements flanks the casket, white carnations and white roses surrounded by even more white lilies, all bobbing slightly in the relentless onslaught of the rain.

They must have cleaned out every florist on the coast to pull something like this off. It would almost be impressive, if the cloying smell of them wasn’t already agitating Sylvain’s once-mild headache into a full-on migraine.

But even _with_ the pounding of his head, Sylvain might be doing better than the rest of them.

He stands exactly halfway between Ingrid and Felix, raising a large, dark umbrella above their heads in some doomed attempt to keep them all as dry as possible. It isn’t working, largely because Felix insists on standing as far away from Ingrid as possible without making a scene of it, always just a half step beyond the reach of the umbrella. Sylvain feels like a child caught in the middle of a messy divorce, asked without words to choose sides in a battle he only knows the smallest bit about.

It’s always been Sylvain’s job to step in at these moments, to smooth things over with a bit of flirting, some well-timed self-deprecation, or a mildly suggestive joke that would turn their frustration to him instead.

But there’s no amount of humor that can fix something like this.

Felix and Ingrid don’t look at each other once throughout the service; they don’t really look at anyone else either, though. Neither of them cries, either, even when Dimitri takes the priest’s place at the water-logged podium to deliver the eulogy. Anyone looking on might see their faces as a cold lack of emotion. But to Sylvain, who has known them both since before they were able to talk, it's anything but.

Felix stares off into the trees in the distance, scowling firmly as his eyes focus anywhere except the recently polished surface of the casket. Sylvain knows without looking that, inside the pockets of his dark jacket, Felix’s hands are balled into tight fists. And that the thin layer of fabric that insulates them from the frigid air might also be the only thing keeping Felix from swinging at the next thing that moves near his general vicinity. He’s been begging for a fight all morning, with anyone and anything unlucky enough to step within range; Sylvain, for mentioning the length of his hair in passing, Dimitri, for talking to Rodrigue in the parking lot, and Ingrid...

Well, at Ingrid for wearing the ring.

In oblivious contrast to Felix’s rage, Ingrid stands with a face as blank as chiseled stone, her gaze locked to the wreath of flowers placed on the casket lid. She fiddles absently with the ring on her left hand, turning the contested gold band over and over around her finger. Sylvain doubts that she’s even aware she’s doing it, but the movement draws the attention of everyone standing nearby like some kind of beacon.

There are too many other people here. A woman somewhere near the back of the crowd is sobbing loudly. The sound of it mingles with the droning words of the priest as he chants something that Sylvain should probably know in monotone Latin; Felix snorts derisively at the sound of her grief. Tradition dictates that he should be standing at the opposite side of the grave, next to Rodrigue, but one look at Felix’s face and none of them had felt like pressing the issue. Dimitri, still wrapped in bandages, stands beside Felix’s father instead, a hand placed in comfort on his shoulder.

The entire tableau is telling.

But what exactly it’s saying about them all?

Not even Sylvain knows the answer to that.

The whole week feels like something out of a bad dream. The kind that starts off normal, but slowly falls apart as it goes along, until you wonder how you could have ever missed it for what it really was. Things had been fine, because he’d seen Glenn less than a week ago, still lecturing Dimitri on the proper way to hold a lacrosse stick from his hospital bed while a doctor in a stark white coat chided him about taking it easy when he got home. Felix had been fuming quietly at Sylvain’s side. Things had been fine, because everyone, even the doctors, thought that Glenn had gotten through the worst of it with nothing but a few broken bones in his leg. But in a matter of a few short hours, things had gone from fine to... well, to _this_.

Sylvain was sleeping when it happened, soundly enough that he’d barely heard the sound of pebbles clattering against the glass of his window through all the rain. It was a miracle, really, that the pane hadn’t broken under the onslaught. When he’d finally opened the window, pulling a shirt over his head as he leaned out, he had found Felix standing in the yard, soaked and blistered from walking the five miles that separated their houses in the pouring rain.

He’d slept on Sylvain’s couch that night... and every night since.

Now, days later, they were here.

 _Here_ , on a cold day in April surrounded by what felt like enough mourners to fill an entire city. Sylvain only knows a few of their faces and even fewer of their names, but he finds himself speaking with them as though they were all old friends each time someone steps close enough to offer Felix their condolences. Acting as a barrier between the general populace and Felix’s increasingly acerbic personality was a skill Sylvain had perfected during the best of times. And today? With Felix entrenched in his own form of mourning and a horde of people bent on pulling him from his comfort zone to assuage their own misplaced survivor’s guilt? Well, it seemed like the least he could do.

Sylvain has barely been paying attention to the homily so far, too lost in his own thoughts and the furtive glances of concern he’s been dividing between Felix and Ingrid when he thought he could get away with it to give much thought to religion. It isn’t long, though, until a pause in the priest’s voice- somehow more notable than any of his previous words- drags him back to the present moment. And though he’s missed most of the message preceding it, the closing words are made clear by the sudden sound of shuffling that conjunctively overtakes the burial site. “-like to say a few words?”

Almost like a wave, the sound builds slowly into soft murmurs and coughs, cresting as all eyes in the crowd seem to rotate collectively and settle, seemingly in unison, on the spot where the three of them stand. The weight of those eyes- and the expectations that come with them- is heavier than Sylvain would have actually thought possible. Beside him, Ingrid sighs, but it sounds more like exhaustion than resignation. Felix, still scowling off into the distance, seems completely unaffected. It seems inevitable that _Sylvain_ is going to have to be the one that breaks this deadlock; of the three, he’s always been the best at addressing a crowd, with a knack for detecting what people most want to hear and probably more charm than was actually good for him. It doesn’t seem entirely appropriate- even though Sylvain was almost exactly halfway between them in age, he’d always been Felix’s friend, not Glenn’s- but if it would smooth away some of the expectancies of the masses, he could make due.

But then, from somewhere to the right, a woman in a simple black dress with an entirely unassuming face steps forward towards the microphone. The eyes slide their attention away to settle on her instead; Sylvain almost catches himself sighing in ill-timed relief.

“If you don’t already know me,” she starts, “I had the pleasure of teaching Glenn at Saint John’s High School not once, but twice while he was in attendance. Glenn was one of the brightest students I have ever encountered, but also one of the most kind-”

Beside him, Felix makes a sharp hiss of disapproval through his teeth. It’s soft enough that the people standing just behind them don’t seem to make much of it, but Sylvain has been hyperfocused on nothing but Felix’s mood all morning long; it catches _his_ attention completely. The teacher continues to speak, her monologue chronicling a host of Glenn’s high school achievements, but Sylvain has all but tuned her out. “You okay?” he murmurs, nudging Felix softly with his free arm.

Felix only rolls his eyes in response.

It’s a dismissive gesture, obviously meant to put Sylvain off. And maybe at some other time, when Felix wasn’t standing in the middle of his brother’s funeral and Sylvain wasn’t jumping a foot in the air at his every movement like he was waiting for an explosion that hadn’t come yet, it might have worked. But for the first time in what feels like hours, standing beside the dark mahogany lid of the casket, their eyes meet.

And even though it’s only for a split second, it’s still enough; it doesn't take someone who knows Felix as well as Sylvain does to see instantly that Felix is very far from okay.

“-and his admirable motivation and leadership, both on and off the field, led to a full scholarship to-“

“Hey,” Sylvain begins softly, reaching out to touch Felix’s shoulder, “If this is too much-“

Beside him, Felix hunches forward, almost like he is in physical pain. It’s hard to tell if it’s the memorial or the contact that does it, but it doesn’t really matter. Sylvain pulls his hand away.

“Felix?”

“-truly one of a kind. The entire community will mourn the loss of one of our most treasured-“

For a moment, when Felix actually looks up and back into Sylvain’s eyes, there is an emotion there that Sylvain doesn’t think he’s seen on Felix’s face since they were little kids. For a moment, his face is perfectly open, his eyes wide and vulnerable in a way that Felix is normally very careful not to let people see.

Sylvain’s surprise must show on his face.

He barely has enough time to blink before Felix seems to realize that he has given something away, and the moment passes. Just like that, the defenses rise again; Felix’s eyes narrow, his expression crumbles back into anger and, without any explanation, he turns and stalks off through the crowd of people around him.

Something that must be shock keeps Sylvain frozen in place, pinned by the sudden silence that descends around the grave. The woman at the podium has stopped mid-sentence, glancing between the space that Felix had just occupied and a concerned looking Rodrigue. Felix’s father steps forward, like he’s planning on going after Felix himself, but they all know that would do a world’s more harm than good.

So Sylvain shoots a silent, significant look in Dimitri’s direction, and passes the umbrella in his hands to a startled looking Ingrid. Dimitri might not be the most emotionally intuitive guy in the room, especially with the concussion still wreaking havoc on his brain, but he understands well enough to murmur something unintelligible to Rodrigue before he can get very far.

Sylvain steps forward, holding up apologetic hands to the crowd at large and says, “Sorry about that, folks. Everything’s fine, I got this. Carry on.”

He doesn’t stay to watch the confused look that passes through several of the guests, but does see the grim nod and even more grim sigh that Rodrigue gives him as he steps back into his earlier position with some amount of resignation. The sound of the teacher’s voice starts up again, hesitating slightly, as Sylvain goes running off in the direction he’d last seen Felix’s retreating form.

Sylvain finds him in a grove of trees near the cemetery fence, wearing a line into the wet dirt under his feet like an angry lion pacing behind the bars of an iron cage.

“What the hell was that?” Sylvain asks, more out of concern than anything else. “You can’t just storm out of your own brother’s funeral.”

Felix doesn’t look up, doesn’t even stop his pacing.

“All those people talking like they knew him, like they know _anything_ ,” Felix bites out through clenched teeth. “He was an idiot and he _died_ like an idiot. He wasn’t a hero.”

“People always say nice things at a funeral, it’s what you’re supposed to-“

But Felix cuts him off before he can finish. “They don’t deserve to say anything.”

Sylvain frowns. “Okay, so you don’t want to go back. That’s cool, let’s just go to my house and-“

“And do what?” Felix interrupts again, this time with a dismissive scoff. His eyes are still firmly locked onto the ground beneath his feet. “Watch TV? Sit around and play video games like everything is exactly the same? Don’t be stupid.”

“All right, all right. I get it. We won’t go home,” Sylvain concedes, palms up in another futile attempt at placation. “But do we have to stay here? I’m getting soaked.”

The gesture doesn’t have the effect he intends; at the sight of his raised hands, Felix makes a noise that sounds more like a wounded animal than any human emotion Sylvain has ever encountered. “Go, then,” he snaps.

It’s the hurt that Sylvain can hear lingering behind the words, not the dismissal, that stings.

“Come on, I’m not leaving you here,” Sylvain replies. His tone is starting to lose some of the forced levity now, sounding increasingly more like pleading with every word that comes out of his mouth. “What about food? We could go to that Indian place you like.”

But Felix just continues to pace as though he hasn’t heard Sylvain at all, his anger visibly building in the rising slope of his shoulders, in the way his knuckles have gone pale where they fist into the fabric of his long coat. It’s almost like watching a record that’s gotten stuck in a groove, repeating the same line over and over again, exactly the same but somehow sounding more desperate with each new turn. Sylvain grimaces. Felix is going to make himself bleed at this rate, Sylvain can almost see his nails digging crescent shapes further and further into the skin of his palm with each step.

So, Sylvain does the only thing that he can think of; he reaches out a hand and catches Felix by the upper arm as he passes, pulling him with some effort to a sudden stop.

“ _Let go of me_ ,” Felix snarls, pivoting quickly in the wet dirt until they are suddenly face to face. He tries to pull his arm away in the process; Sylvain only tightens his grip.

The sound of the rain pouring down around them crescendos with the tension, masking everything but the sound of Felix’s breathing, forced through still clenched teeth, and the sound of an obscured bird crying out in alarm overhead.

But Felix is _looking_ at Sylvain now, even though it’s through narrowed, furious eyes. The anger, intense but at least directed at something tangible, is somehow better than being pushed aside while Felix suffered on his own. And if meant that he was about to get punched for his trouble, well, it wouldn’t be the first time; there’s a scar just above his right eyebrow and another on Felix’s chin that bears testament to a particularly merciless fight they’d had when Felix was ten. Sylvain would rather not relive that moment now, but...

If that’s what Felix needs, Sylvain realizes abruptly, he would do it.

Even if it meant taking a few more hits to the face or ruining one of the best suits he owns; if an all-out brawl here in the muddy edges of the town cemetery would make things easier somehow, Sylvain was ready. He would do pretty much _anything_ if it would help, whatever it took to erase some of the pain that was lurking behind the fury in Felix’s eyes.

The understanding hits him harder than an actual punch to the stomach, leaves him suddenly out of breath and vaguely nauseous as the sensation settles over him. It’s not that the emotion itself is new, he and Felix have been exactly this type of ride or die friends for as long as Sylvain can remember. He’s always been willing to make a fool of himself if it meant that he’d get to see Felix smile again. But this urgency, this frantic need to make Felix understand the lengths that Sylvain would go to if it meant he could somehow share the burden of his grief, is different. The motivation behind it has changed, the _emotion_ , and that alone is enough to throw him completely out of his typical rhythm.

There was a word for that feeling, Sylvain knows.

He can feel it rising to the tip of his tongue, pressing against his closed lips like it is straining to break free.

Felix stares back at him, aggressive in his silence. His face is flushed with the intensity of so much anger, his hair disheveled from the wind that stirs the branches of the trees around them. And even now, _especially_ now, Sylvain could never deny that Felix is heart-breakingly stunning. It leaves his chest aching and his head pounding with the magnitude of it all.

A part of him knows that he’s always recognized it, just below the surface of their friendship, guiding every choice he’s made up until this very moment. The feeling has always been there; maybe there just hasn’t been a reason to acknowledge it before now.

But in the end, the timeline and all the tiny details aren’t really important, are they? All that matters in that moment is that there’s nothing on Earth, not even Felix himself, that was going to make him let go now.

“No chance,” Sylvain replies eventually, his fingers pressing even more firmly into the fabric around Felix’s arm. “If you’re going to hit me, then hit me. But I’m not letting go until you tell me what you want.”

It sounds too much like a promise, a desperate rush of breath that says more about _devotion_ than demand. It undermines the words, turns their meaning into something else entirely. A brief flash of confusion dances across Felix’s face, settling his expression into an even deeper frown, and Sylvain tilts his chin up to the strike that he is almost certain is about to come.

But then, almost as if cued, the sound of thunder rumbles through the sky overhead. Sylvain can feel it reverberate deep within his chest, through Felix’s rigid shoulders, and in the ground beneath their feet. A crash of lightning follows just moments after, lighting up the cloud-filled sky, and just like that, something palpable in the atmosphere shifts between them.

Felix flinches and looks away, anger melting from his stance as he exhales a long and shuddering breath into the air around him.

The sleeve under Sylvain’s fingers has unrolled, falling down to cover Felix’s now-limp hand. He hadn’t realized that the suit that Felix was wearing, one of Sylvain’s castoffs pulled from the depths of his closet when Felix had refused to step foot into his own house to change, was still so long. It makes Felix seem suddenly, small in a way his usual posture would never allow. So much so that it takes an astonishing amount of effort on Sylvain’s part, then, not to pull Felix close to him. He wonders if Felix would let him, what it would feel like to hold Felix close to him in his arms.

Sylvain exhales an unsteady sigh of his own instead.

“I want to leave,” Felix says finally, so quiet in defeat that Sylvain can barely hear the words over the sound of the rain that still falls around them. But he can tell by the slump of Felix’s shoulders and the look in his eyes that he doesn’t just mean the cemetery.

“Okay, easy,” Sylvain nods, giving what he hopes is a reassuring smile, though it feels hollow. He’s still gripping the edge of Felix’s coat like it’s the only lifeline either of them have left. “Then let’s go somewhere.”

Felix makes a soft noise of disbelief, but it lacks the usual fight. “Go where?”

“Does it matter?” Sylvain asks.

But they both know it doesn’t.

They take Glenn’s truck.

It seems like the right thing to do, partially because of the circumstances, but also because Felix has never gotten around to buying a car of his own and Sylvain’s can barely hold the two of them, let alone a suitcase and a pair of sleeping bags. Taking it feels almost criminal, though, even when they’ve both spent plenty of time driving it before today. It must be the way Sylvain turns the key in the lock of Felix’s back door, as quietly as he possibly can, even though anyone who might try to stop them is either still at the funeral or the reason they’d been there in the first place. It could be the way Felix stands watch from outside, leaning against the side of the forest green cab with his eyes narrowed behind his dark sunglasses. But, more than anything, it’s the way that they’re going to take it without mentioning anything to anyone else.

Sylvain knows for a fact that Felix’s phone has been dead for over twenty-four hours now. He also knows that the depleted battery was more or less an intentional move, even if Felix might pretend otherwise. So he follows suit without question, sending Dimitri a cryptic text that says only ‘ _take care of Ingrid for me while we’re gone, would you?_ ’ even though it’s beyond unfair of him to ask something like that now, and turns off the power on his own phone.

From there, all that’s left is to start the ignition; Sylvain turns the key and shifts into gear without another word.

But if he’d had any doubts about running off like this, they would have started to evaporate as soon as the single-lane roads of their town give way to the larger, state highways. The storm stops after only a few dozen miles south, clouds above the hood of the truck breaking up around them to reveal a pale and patchy, but still sunlit, afternoon sky.

By the time they hit the expressway, Felix is visibly calmer. Whether it’s the distance from home or the low, steady hum of the truck’s engine that placates him, Sylvain doesn’t know, but he’s grateful all the same. He sends glances as surreptitiously as he can out of the corner as his eyes as he drives, watching Felix’s gaze track the billboards that march past the passenger window in an endless parade from where he rests his chin against his bent arm.

Sylvain doesn’t bother to ask where they should go, doesn’t say much of anything at all, just allows the sound of the static laden radio station that Glenn had left programmed into the console to fill the cabin. They have a full tank of gas and a whole country’s worth of roads laid out in front of them; any plan beyond that seems unnecessary. Sylvain hums gently under his breath to songs he only barely knows, watching the hills around them gradually give way to flatter, open ground.

When he glances over to Felix again as they cross the state border, he is sound asleep, his head cradled against the worn leather padding of the passenger door. It might be the first time he’s actually slept in days. The sight fills Sylvain with a warmth he can’t exactly explain away, except that it causes the same, gentle ache from earlier to rise up from within him. The sensation is overwhelming enough that he has to look away or risk getting so caught up in the way the sunlight plays against the skin of Felix’s gently parted lips and ink-black hair that he might just steer the car into the gulley between the lanes of the expressway.

Sylvain runs a distracted, sheepish hand through his own hair instead, and laughs gently into the silence that surrounds them.

It’s love, he knows it, as inappropriate and ill-timed as the realization is. There really isn’t a point in denying it now, not when it takes all of the ample self-control he’s developed just to stop himself from pulling the car over and confessing the whole thing right then and there.

It’s _love_ and Felix is his best friend in the whole world who’s grieving the loss of his brother. This is going to ruin everything between them, Sylvain knows it, because now that he understands it, there’s no way he’s going to be able to ignore it.

But it’s love.

It’s staggering and terrifying, awful and _incredible_ all at once.

Sylvain glances back to Felix’s sleeping form, watching his chest rising and falling in deep, easy breaths.

It’s _love_ , and as far as secrets go? There are definitely worse ones to keep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry, this got away from me. It was turning into a 20k friends to lovers, cross country road trip, bed-sharing, mutual pining epic. But that's not what this fic is about. I had to cut it off, even though that means I never got to this interaction:
> 
> _“Did you ever wish you never had a brother?” Felix asks quietly._
> 
> _The question sits heavily in the air, almost as tangible as the space left between them on the uncomfortable single bed, so carefully maintained that Sylvain isn’t sure he could move if he wanted to._
> 
> _“Yeah,” Sylvain admits in a murmur. “Still do, sometimes.”_
> 
> Oh well, I hope you enjoyed it anyway! Thank you so much for reading!


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